Communications between professionals and their clients, or with others on behalf of clients, are frequently carried out on mobile hand-held devices, such as smart phones. This is typically done when a professional is out of the office and is without access to his or her time reporting system, so that the time spent on such communications may not be accurately recorded. Professionals often bill clients on the basis of the amount of time spent on activities on behalf of the client, and, as such, it is important that a professional accurately records as much of such time as possible.
Many systems have been developed to record professionals' time on a computer. Clients are generally assigned client numbers, and may also be assigned matter or file numbers for particular tasks. A typical time reporting system facilitates recording the amount of time a professional spends on a particular matter by recording, for each continuous activity performed on that matter, or for all such activities related to a matter performed in a day, the time spent along with the matter number and a description of the work performed. Such time records may be periodically transmitted to a billing system that incorporates into each client's bill a charge for the activity described in each time record based on the amount of time spent and the professional's billing rate.
Some systems have attempted to capture billable time while using a mobile device by the use of an application that resides on the mobile device and records the durations of calls. Such systems typically require the professional to manually enter client or file identification information into the mobile device. This can be difficult for professionals who deal with many clients or where clients may have many on-going matters. Some systems have attempted to address these problems by caching client or matter numbers, and associated descriptions, associated with particular telephone numbers or e-mail addresses on the mobile device. However this still requires the professional to enter the information into the mobile device initially, whenever any new matter arises and whenever an entry has been removed from the cache because of space limitations. Such systems also do not automate entry of a description of the interaction.
Some such prior art systems have provision for automatically transmitting time records back to a server. Recognizing that such transmissions may overtax the capacity of a professional firm's servers, some systems incorporate a third party server for collection of time records. This approach creates the problem of placing sensitive, confidential or privileged information in the hands of a third party.